PC prices skyrocket to combat buoyant dollar

Up 10%

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PC prices will increase by up to 10% this year as manufacturers aim to address short-term currency woes hitting the market thanks to the rising US dollar.

Gartner's latest report into the state of the PC market found that prices in the Eurozone and Japan will increase by up to 10% in 2015 and due to that end-user spending will rise by 4% to $116 billion (around £75 billion, or AU$144 billion) in Western Europe.

"Device vendors will mitigate the impact of their declining "dollarised" profits by taking advantage of single-digit-percentage decreases in PC component costs during 2015, and by selling PCs with fewer features to keep prices down," said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. "However, vendors' margins will fall, even as they shift their shipment focus to the regions least affected by these currency effects."

Strictly speaking the consumers are split up into three different categories, according to Gartner. In 2016, price-driven customers that spend less than $500 (around £323, or AU$620) will make up 30% of the market, value-driven ($500 to $800) buyers will make up 40% and feature-driven (over $800) consumers will account for 30% of the market.

Lenovo leads the way

Businesses, meanwhile, will continue taking money from the PC budget to prioritise other parts of the IT budget such as for software and services that will, in turn, allow organisations to lengthen PC lifetimes by six months, says the report.

Lenovo currently lead the way globally in Q1 2015 with an 18.9% share of the market, HP trailing close behind on 17.3%, according to Gartner's figures. PC shipments as a whole did decline by 5.2% yet mobile PCs, which includes notebooks, hybrids and Windows tablets, actually grew compared to the year before.